The boy learned the truth long before he learned how to cultivate.
His mother told him when he was five, on a night when the oil lamp burned low and the roof leaked in three places they no longer bothered to repair. The workshop beneath their house smelled of old metal and ash that never quite settled, as if the forge itself refused to forget what it had once been used for. She sat on the floor across from him, her back against the wall, her breathing steady but thin.
She did not whisper.
"You are the last," she said.
The words were plain. Too plain to be comforting. She placed two fingers against his chest as she spoke, pressing hard enough that he felt his heartbeat react. At the time, he thought she was simply emphasizing her point, the way adults did when they wanted children to listen.
"The last of what?" he asked.
She did not answer immediately. Her gaze drifted instead to the tools hanging on the wall—too few, too worn, arranged with care that bordered on reverence. This place had once been important. He could feel that even then, without knowing why.
"The last of us," she said at last. "The last blood."
He accepted the answer without understanding it. Blood, to him, was something scraped from knees or wiped from lips after accidents. It did not yet carry history.
"They were killed," she continued, before he could ask another question.
That was the first fracture. Adults usually avoided that word. They softened it, replaced it with stories or distance. She did neither.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because we wanted to make something," she said.
That night, she told him about God Essence.
She did not explain what it was in detail. She did not speak of realms, laws, or divine hierarchies. She simply said the words and waited for his reaction. Something tightened in his chest when he heard them, an instinctive response that came too quickly to be learned.
"To consume God's essence" she said, "and use it to create something that cannot be recreated. Not by gods. Not by anyone."
He did not ask whether it was right or wrong. Those were questions children learned later.
"Did we succeed?" he asked instead.
She shook her head.
"No," she said. "That is why you are alive."
Years later, as illness hollowed her body and healers stopped visiting because there was nothing left to offer them, she spoke again. Not all at once. Fragments, passed carefully, as if even speaking too much might draw attention from something that still listened.
They had not always been what the world later called them.
Before the purge, before the word evil became a convenient shape to pour fear into, they were artisans. They forged weapons, armor, and artifacts for others—objects meant to endure. They were respected not for power, but for reliability. Their creations did not fail when failure meant death.
They were ordinary.
Until the genius was born.
She never spoke his name. By the time she lived, the name no longer existed. Whatever it had once been, it had been erased so completely that even memory could not reach it.
He was a clan head whose ambition had no ceiling. Where others saw completion, he saw insult. Where others refined, he dismantled and rebuilt. Creation itself was not sacred to him—it was a process meant to be exhausted, pushed until it yielded something final.
Gods created worlds. Cultivators refined themselves. Laws enforced balance.
He rejected all three.
If gods could create, then something should exist that gods themselves could not reproduce. If the heavens imposed limits, then those limits were nothing more than materials awaiting use. He turned craftsmanship inward, toward the body, the soul, and the principles that governed existence.
What began as creation became transgression.
What began as transgression became heresy.
The response was inevitable.
Righteous sects declared them corrupted. Empires labeled them destabilizing. Allies vanished. Contracts dissolved. The gods, distant and silent, withdrew whatever indifference they had once offered.
Then came extermination.
The boy was born long after the fires had burned out. By the time he existed, there were no ancestral halls left to destroy, no records worth burning, and no disciples left to interrogate. The purge had been so thorough that it erased not just people, but identity.
Even the clan name was gone.
His mother never told him what it was—not because she withheld it, but because she did not know. By the time she was born, the name had already ceased to exist. It had not survived as a curse or a whisper. It had simply ended.
What remained was only a phrase, detached and imprecise: evil cultivators.
A label without an owner.
She died when he was twelve.
Not by blade or divine punishment, but by sickness and exhaustion. Before the end, she gripped his wrist with strength that did not belong to a dying body.
"Survive first," she said. "Observe. Let the world forget you completely."
Then she was gone.
Now, at sixteen, he worked alone in the remnants of their workshop.
The forge was cracked. The bellows wheezed. The tools were mismatched and old, but his hands moved with certainty. He did not need instruction. The knowledge was incomplete, but it lived in instinct and correction rather than memory.
He forged weapons meant to be unremarkable.
Iron alloyed cheaply. Balanced well enough to sell. No inscriptions. No spiritual resonance worth noticing. Each blade passed inspection and disappeared into the city without consequence.
That anonymity was deliberate.
As the hammer rang against the anvil, a familiar pressure gathered behind his eyes. The metal obeyed too easily. It bent, flowed, and complied. That obedience irritated something deep inside him.
Creation, some buried instinct insisted, should resist.
He forced the thought down.
Not yet.
He quenched the blade, tested it, and wrapped it in cloth. It was sufficient. Nothing more.
As he cleaned his tools, his senses tightened.
Someone was nearby.
Not a true cultivator. Someone careful. Someone watching from the edge of attention, thin and uncertain. A scout who expected to find nothing and hoped to be correct.
He did not react. He let the forge die naturally, his posture loose, his breathing even. Panic would have been an admission.
Through a crack in the wall, he saw the shadow pause at the mouth of the alley, linger, then withdraw.
When the presence faded, the workshop returned to silence.
The world had not merely destroyed his lineage. It had forgotten it so completely that even hatred no longer had a target. There were no names left to curse, no history to reclaim, and no legacy to resurrect.
Only the goal remained.
It did not require language or justification. It persisted as pressure and direction, embedded deeper than conscious thought. Something that guided the hands even when the mind hesitated.
Consume God's essence.
Create what cannot be recreated.
The world believed evil cultivators were extinct, and in every way that history could measure, it was correct. There would be no recognition if he succeeded, no immediate outrage. When the time came, the result would appear without a source—an effect without a cause.
That was the most dangerous outcome possible.
He extinguished the last ember and locked the workshop. Outside, the city slept beneath indifferent heavens. Gods still existed, distant and unchallenged, their authority condensed into laws, fate, and legitimacy—into a substance no one believed could be touched.
That belief had killed his lineage once.
It would not save the world again.
He vanished into the night like someone who had never mattered. Records would continue to decay. Names would remain unspoken. The past would stay buried.
And beneath all of it, unseen and unnamed, the sin without an owner continued to wait.